With the growing proliferation of Internet domains, websites have moved far beyond the .com's of yesteryear, making it easier than ever to create a demeaning or misleading URL. Should you follow Swift's lead and head off the domain trolls, before someone lays claim to YourName.Sucks?

Color us skeptical whenever a hip new social networking fad comes around. Remember Ello? So do we: At least we remember signing up, writing a story about it, and then never using it ever again. Between all the myriad social networks (and their core audiences), new networks have to more than just provide a place for you to say "hey" to your friends.

For its part, Facebook had to go all meta on us and create a new social network experience within its existing social network. Earlier this week, the company debuted its new product, "Facebook at Work," which could either be great, ominous, or confusing.

Boies' bluster is still blustery. And it may be having the opposite of the desired effect.

Last week, we told you about the letters noted litigator David Boies has sent on behalf of Sony to numerous media outlets. The letters basically threaten to rain down fire and brimstone upon anyone who reports on or posts information that was stolen in the big hack that has been the story in the news for the past few weeks.

Not content with challenging the freedom of the press, however, Boies has now moved on to a new target: Twitter and its users.

Here's some non-news: Cops use social media to catch criminals. But it's not just criminals broadcasting their misdeeds to the wider world, unimpeded by privacy settings or discretion.

No, cops can and do make fake profiles to stalk criminals without being detected. If a cop walks into a bar, pretends to be a bartender, and overhears a confession, that's not a constitutional violation, is it? That's basically what we have here -- cops posing as somebody else to gather intel.

Following Citizens United, FEC v. SpeechNow, and McCutcheon, what remains of federal election law is that political action committees can't coordinate with candidates and parties if they want their expenditures to remain "independent."

There are, however, no limits to the ways in which PACs will exploit loopholes (and that's a fact!). This week, CNN reported on a creative way to skirt election laws that sounds like a rejected idea from a John le Carre novel.

MySpace came, then went. So did Friendster. Tumblr was cool once, but then Yahoo bought it and it may or may not be still cool. Facebook and Twitter, for now, have staying power.

But Facebook is evil, man. It's like gathering all of your data to push ads down your throat, and it handed so many things over to the government. It's basically big brother, bro, and nobody likes a surveillance state (or private industry -- whatever).

That's what Ello is: a social network without real name requirements, without data mining, and alas, at least so far, without a lot of other things, like granular privacy controls or you know ... people?

Here are some initial impressions about Ello from my fellow blogger Mark Wilson and me, after trying it out last week:

By now, hopefully we've grown up and realized the fiction that is the "sharing" economy; that is, it's not a lot of "sharing" but a lot of "regular economy."

The San Francisco Chronicle pored through Airbnb's data for that city and found that, far from letting Mom and Pop rent out a spare room, two thirds of the listings were for entire houses or apartments, and one third of the "sharers" listed multiple rentals. (Although, as the Chron acknowledges, many different individual renters hire one of a few property management companies to handle the rentals -- but isn't that also a problem when you have to hire a property management company?)

It's FindLaw's "Legal Shark Week" which means, like it or not, you're going to see a lot of shark-themed posts. If you were traumatized as a kid by the movie "Jaws," we apologize in advance.

Today's topic? Three ways you can be a tech-savvy shark, starting with social media, and continuing with metadata and e-discovery. And as you'll see, these tips aren't just for the fiercest predators -- some of them are actually necessary to be a competent guppy:

Until recently, at least one company thought you could share your San Francisco public parking space, but the San Francisco City Attorney quickly put that one to bed, as SF Weekly reported.

It's too soon to be sharing our underwear and kidneys -- the inevitable endpoint of our dystopian future -- but a new app called Fixed is here to help you fight your parking tickets. That's a nice service, but is it legal?